In the jazz age, America discovered its cultural voice

It's no exaggeration to say that the 1920s formed modern America in ways so vast and far-reaching that we take them for granted today--particularly in the field of culture but no less in America's consciousness of itself as a society and of the place it might have in the world. World War I had destroyed the Old Order in Europe and made a superpower of democratic, industrial America. It seemed obvious to many Americans that they were poised, collectively, to lead the world. And the future American, wrote a Jewish dramatist named Israel Zangwill in a play famously titled The Melting...